U.K. Lord Ahmed Blamed “Jewish Media” For Dangerous Driving Jailing

U.K. media is reporting that Labour peer Lord Ahmed Nazir has reportedly blamed Jewish-owned media organisations for his imprisonment for texting a message before his car was involved in a fatal car accident. According to a BBC News report:

A Labour peer has reportedly blamed Jewish-owned media organisations for his imprisonment for dangerous driving.The Labour Party has suspended Lord Ahmed while it investigates the comments reported in the Times. The peer, jailed for sending a text message shortly before his car was involved in a fatal crash, said Jewish owners of ‘newspapers and TV channels’ had put pressure on the court, according to the newspaper. Lord Ahmed has declined to comment. In a statement, the Labour Party said it ‘deplores and does not tolerate any sort of racism or anti-Semitism’. ‘We will be seeking to clarify these remarks as soon as possible,’ the statement added. Lord Ahmed is reported to have made the comments in a television interview, thought to have been broadcast in April last year, while he was on a visit to Pakistan. According to the Times, he told an Urdu-language broadcast he should have been sentenced by a magistrate but pressure had been placed on the courts to charge him with a more serious offence because of his support for Palestinians. ‘My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians. My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this,’ the Times reports him as saying in the television interview. He said the judge who had sentenced him had been appointed to the High Court after helping a ‘Jewish colleague’ of Tony Blair during ‘an important case’, the newspaper adds. ‘Appalled’ Lord Ahmed was jailed for 12 weeks in 2008 after sending and receiving text messages while driving. He was freed by the Court of Appeal after serving 16 days of the sentence because of ‘exceptional’ mitigation relating to his community work. He had been involved in a fatal crash minutes after sending the messages on Christmas Day 2007.

Lord Ahmed has a number of connections to the global Muslim Brotherhood. For example, he is listed as a member of the Advisory Board of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists UK (AMSSUK), the U.K. branch of the American organization by the same name which is headquartered at the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), a part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. The AMSS was founded in 1972 as an outgrowth of the Muslim Student Association by important members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood including Jamal Barzinji, currently a leader of IIIT, and the late Ismail Faruqi, a pivotal figure in the “Islamization of Knowledge” project. AMSS has sponsored annual conferences and publishes a journal entitled American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences (AJISS) in conjunction with IIIT which plays host to the AMSS.

A post from July 2012 reported that the Labour Party had lifted the suspension of Lord Ahmed Nazir in connection with the allegations that he had offered a bounty on the head of U.S. President Obama and former President George Bush. According to another Pakistani media report, cited and translated by MEMRI, Lord Ahmed had also recently claimed that the U.S. was planning an attack on Iran to divert attention from the country’s financial situation and called on the Muslim world to “united against the attacking powers.” In October 2011, a post reported that US Special Envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Conference Rashad Hussain, together with representatives of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, were invited to speak at a U.K. event hosted by Lord Nazir Ahmed. An earlier post discussed Lord Ahmed’s participation in a British Muslim delegation that was expected to deliver a “letter of thanks” to the Turkish Embassy in London expressing gratitude over Turkish Prime MInister Erdogan’s remarks strongly criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza that were made at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Jerusalem Post report indicates that Lord Ahmed was the leader of the delegation.

The Jerusalem Post has reported on some of the Islamist connections and anti-Semitic activities of Lord Nazir Ahmed, who became the United Kingdom’s first Muslim life peer in 1998.:

Previously, Ahmed used his influence to introduce the lord high chancellor to Sheikh Suhaib Hasan to discuss introducing Islamic divorce laws into the UK, the think tank said. In a 2008 documentary, Hasan said, “Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society. This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low.” According to the British current affairs magazine Spectator, Ahmed recently threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent the House of Lords from screening Fitna, a short film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders that claims that Islam sanctions terrorism. He also threatened to take the organizer of the event to court. He called the decision not to screen the film a victory for the Muslim community. In 2005, Ahmed hosted a book launch in the House of Lords for a writer who frequently uses anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work. Russian-born Israel Shamir claimed the blood libels against the Jews were in fact true and that all political parties were Zionist-infiltrated. Shamir is a citizen of Sweden, where his legal name is Adam Ermash. In an interview on Press TV, an Iranian satellite channel, during Operation Cast Lead, Ahmed said that Jewish student groups actively recruited for the IDF, and that British Jews who fight in the IDF should be arrested and, if necessary, charged with war crimes.

In June 2012, a post reported that Lord Nazir Ahmed had cancelled his plans to host far-right extremist groups at the House of Lords.